A Companion to the History of the Book (3 page)

Graham Shaw
is Head of Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections at the British Library. His particular field of research is the history of printing and publishing in South Asia. Apart from many articles on the subject, he has published
Printing in Calcutta to 1800
(1981) and
The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB): Stage 1: 1556–1800
(1987), and was co-compiler of
Publications Proscribed by the Government of India
(1985). Most recently, he has completed a study of censorship in India and its circumvention under the British Raj from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Claire Squires
is Senior Lecturer in Publishing in the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University, and Programme Leader for the MA in Publishing. Her publications include
Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials
(2006) and
Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain
(2007).

Rietje van Vliet
writes as a freelance research journalist for various media about higher education in the Netherlands. In 2005, she took her PhD at the University of Leiden for her dissertation “Elie Luzac (1721–1796): Boekverkoper van de Verlichting.” She has, among other subjects, published about Dutch hacks, propaganda in the Dutch revolution of 1783–99, and Dutch–German book-trade relations. She is currently working on a research project about the eighteenth-century Amsterdam bookseller Marc-Michel Rey

James Wald
is Associate Professor of History at Hampshire College, where he directs the Center for the Book. He is also a member of the board of the Massachusetts Center for the Book and treasurer of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

Rowan Watson
is a curator in the National Art Library, part of the Word and Image Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has published works on illuminated manuscripts, and on illustrated and artists’ books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He teaches in the History of the Book program at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Alexis Weedon
is the author of
Victorian Publishing: Book Publishing for the Mass Market 1836–1916
(2003) and co-editor of
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.
She is Professor of Publishing Studies and Director of the Research Institute for Media Art and Design at the University of Bedfordshire. Her research interests include the economics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing, the publishing industry and cross-media integration, and online bookselling.

Adriaan van der Weel
is Bohn Professor of Recent Dutch Book History at the University of Leiden. His research interests include Anglo-Dutch relations in the field of the book; the production, distribution, and consumption of popular and trivial literature; and digital textual transmission. He edits the yearbook of the Dutch Book Historical Society.

Wayne A. Wiegand
is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University. He is the author of
‘An Active Instrument for Propaganda”: American Public Libraries during World War I
(1988) and
Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey
(1996). He is co-editor with James P. Danky
of Print Culture in a Diverse America
(1998), with Thomas Augst
of Libraries as Agencies of Culture
(2001), and with Anne Lundin
of Defining Print Culture for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children’s Literature
(2003).

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she held a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship between 2002 and 2006. Her most recent book is
No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization
(2004).

Introduction

Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

The history of the book is a new scholarly adventure, still in its pioneering phase, which offers an innovative approach to studying both history and literature. It is based on two apparently simple premises, which have inspired some strikingly original work in the humanities. The first is that books make history. In
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
(1979), Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that the invention of print technology made possible the scientific revolution, mobilized the Protestant Reformation, and broadcast the achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Meanwhile, Robert Darnton was making the case that scurrilous underground literature undermined France’s
ancien régime
to the point where it collapsed in 1789. They inspired other scholars to pose similar questions about books and historical causation. Did escalating press rhetoric precipitate the French Reign of Terror and the American Civil War? Did
samizdat
literature contribute to the implosion of Soviet communism? Can the arrested development of Middle Eastern print culture, hemmed in by censorship, help to explain problems of modernization in that part of the world? Book historians do not claim that books explain everything, but they do recognize that books are the primary tools that people use to transmit ideas, record memories, create narratives, exercise power, and distribute wealth. (That remained true even in the twentieth century, when cinematic, broadcast, sound recording, and digital media became increasingly pervasive.) Therefore, when we study any literate human society, we must ask what books it produced, where they were distributed, which libraries held them, how they were censored (or smuggled past the censors), where and how they were translated, and who was reading them. We should also be aware that readers can read the same book in a variety of ways, with important consequences: after all, wars have been fought over differing interpretations of scriptures and treaties.

Conversely, books are made by history: that is, they are shaped by economic, political, social, and cultural forces. No book is created solely by its author: printers, publishers, literary agents, editors, designers, and lawyers all play a role in molding the final product. Critics, booksellers, and educational bureaucrats can proclaim a book a classic or consign it to oblivion. And every writer must take into account the demands of the reading public and the laws of literary property.

These issues have engaged a growing body of scholars working in a range of fields: history, literature, librarianship, art, sociology, religion, anthropology. Recently, these scholars have come together to build the apparatus of a new academic discipline of their own, including undergraduate and graduate courses, monographs, textbooks, bibliographies, conferences, and journals. In 1991, they organized the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), whose website (www.sharpweb.org) is the most comprehensive and up-to-the-minute source of information about the world of book historians. Academics have worked collectively on multivolume national histories of the book in France, Britain, the United States, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. What has been lacking is a wider, more comparative history of the book, surveying all historical periods, distilling the best of recent scholarship. We have designed this volume to fill that gap. Our intended audience includes specialists, students, and lay readers alike – in fact, anyone who needs a broad, general introduction to the whole field of book history and the questions that it addresses.

Book history uses the word “book” in its widest sense, covering virtually any piece of written or printed text that has been multiplied, distributed, or in some way made public. This means that a book historian is interested in graffiti on a wall in Pompeii as well as in a letter by Cicero, in an eighteenth-century German chapbook as well as in Diderot and dAlembert’s
Encyclopédie,
in a catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 as well as in a first edition
oí David Copperfield.
Given the discipline’s breadth and depth, and in order to make this very rich subject fully accessible, we offer a number of different but complementary ways of approaching it.

Part I, “Methods and Approaches,” introduces the reader to a number of techniques used by book historians and allied specialists, ranging from the long-established disciplines of bibliography and textual scholarship to newer, frequently IT-based, approaches such as bibliometrics.

Part II, “The History of the Material Text,” offers a chronological survey of the forms and content of books from the third millennium bc to the third millennium ad. It is too easy for us to think of the “book” as always having looked like the volume that we today take off a library shelf or buy in an airport lounge: a “codex” to use the jargon. However, for roughly the first three thousand years of its existence, the “book” would most usually have taken the form of a clay tablet or a roll of papyrus. The section “The World before the Codex” therefore begins with two chapters that study this long and important stage in the evolution of the material text, too often overlooked by those of us brought up on the Western codex. Similarly, and all too frequently, book historians in the West (and by this we mean mostly Europe, North America, and Australasia) devote themselves exclusively to their relatively small part of the world. However, we forget the book beyond these narrow confines at our intellectual peril. The section “The Book beyond the West” therefore has chapters devoted to China, to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, to South Asia, and to Latin America, which, though it became an extension of Western print culture after the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, had a long and separate textual culture before that event. This section also focuses on two important religious and linguistic traditions of the book that mainly employ non-Roman alphabets: the Hebraic and the Islamic book. The section “The Codex in the West 400–2000” returns to more familiar territory to study the evolution of the codex from the early centuries of the first millennium to the present day.

Part III, “Beyond the Book,” moves us away from conventional forms to look at other types of text that are less traditional but no less important: the development of periodicals and periodical publishing; the significance of all sorts of ephemeral printing, and the emergence of new textual technologies from the microform revolution through CD-ROMs to the World Wide Web.

Finally, Part IV, “Issues,” discusses broader themes, including the concept of literary property, the relationship between obscenity and censorship, the book as an aesthetic and ritual object, and the nature and function of the library. The
Companion
concludes with an exploration of what the book might become in the future.

A common theme runs through every chapter in this volume: that is, the book has always been inextricably embedded in the material world. Though literary critics and theorists feel able to talk about a text as though it were some disembodied entity, for the book historian the text always takes an embodied form. In entering the world of things, a text becomes an object created out of certain materials and taking characteristic forms (a clay tablet, a papyrus roll, a parchment codex, a printed book on paper, an image on a screen). The manufacturing of a book using these materials is a process through which the nature and cost of the materials, and the strengths and weaknesses of the human beings using them, will influence the product, sometimes to the extent of modifying or significantly changing the original text and thus its meaning.

Embodying the text has two contrary effects. It becomes fixed, unlike most oral performances. It can also be copied, though copying opens up the possibility of variations, intended or accidental. But once written down, even those variations seem to claim an authority through permanence that orality cannot (and probably would not wish to) match. Some texts remain pretty firmly fixed: quite often those that are copied only a very few times or exist in few places, such as the early texts of the Book of the Dead carved in the walls of Egyptian tombs or the Chinese texts inscribed in stone which could be copied by means of a rubbing. Some cultures in India have preserved, through a tradition of very careful copying, a culture of limited textual variation, as have the Jewish and Islamic traditions of meticulous scribal reproduction. But in most other cultures, the more copies, the more variations; the more generations through which a text passes, the more errors, as though book production were some epic game of Chinese whispers (or “telephone” as it is sometimes known) conducted over time and through space.

Distribution is another aspect of the inescapable materiality of books. Until the coming of the railways in the nineteenth century, transport, particularly of vulnerable and often bulky merchandise such as books, was usually slow, difficult, and consequently expensive. Until the arrival of mass literacy and mass production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the number of people who could afford to buy books within a modest ride of the place of production was often too small to represent a profitable market, so books had to travel great distances to sell sufficient copies. It is quite possible, for instance, that the first book printed on movable type in the West, Gutenberg’s forty-two-line Bible, would not have sold so well without the easy transport route to other parts of Europe offered by the Rhine. Getting books to their markets, how they are sold when they get there, their place of sale, their price, and the other goods that are sold with them are all material factors that concern our contributors.

For much of the past, many books, unless they were single sheets or small rolls or pamphlets, were relatively expensive. As an alternative to outright purchase, readers often borrowed, rented, or perused reading matter in (for example) bookshops, libraries, and coffee houses. Such different physical circumstances of reading would have influenced to a significant extent what the reader derived from it. In fact, readers, even in the best and most comfortable circumstances, often read and use books in ways unintended by their makers: reading inevitably generates difference, diversity, and dissension. No wonder books, unless their production and distribution are under strict control, have often been regarded as potentially dangerous and in need of control or censorship for religious, political, or moral reasons – or for a mix of the three.

As books spread out, a counter-movement becomes evident. This is the desire to bring copies together: to collect, to compare, to preserve, to edit, to control, to censor. If not quite as early as the earliest books, libraries, in the form of archives that contained mainly bureaucratic records but also preserved versions of myth-based literature, can be found as early as 2250 bc (Casson 2001: 3). But even the grandest and the oldest collections, such as the Alexandrian Library, faltered, declined, and had their collections dispersed. And so the distribution of their books began again.

As we can see from the contents of early Sumerian collections, texts in the past were, as they still are today, overwhelmingly practical and functional. “Literature” tends to come later and always occupies a smaller part of most collections. Indeed, even in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, when literature in general and fiction in particular became so commercially significant, no more than a fraction of all titles was devoted to it. This
Companion
gives due attention to non-fiction publishing, ranging from textbooks to timetables.

Access to books has always been a pressing and difficult matter, and this is why institutional collections in royal palaces, schools, monasteries, great men’s houses, universities, and local public libraries have always been so important. But it also explains why, at various stages in history, attempts have been made to make texts cheaper. The introduction of printing in mid-fifteenth-century Europe, and particularly the application of steam power to printing and papermaking in the early nineteenth century, made real mass production possible. There is, however, much earlier evidence for cheap books: the text of a play in classical Athens, a cheap leaf or two from the Book of the Dead in Ptolemaic Egypt, a collection of Martial’s poems in imperial Rome. However, much of what was cheapest and most readily available has not survived: as with most historical evidence, it is the best and most valuable that has tended to be preserved. But, by good luck, just occasionally one can perceive – in the dust heaps of Oxyrhynchus, in a poorly copied student text of the late medieval period, in a seventeenth-century newspaper, or a Victorian advertising poster – the remarkable world of cheap and accessible texts that we have mostly lost.

Most forms of text (very special forms, such as Buddhist scriptures, excepted) have a value in history because of their potential to be read or used in some way or other. However important the author, the manufacturer, the distributor, the seller, or the librarian, books would mean little without readers or users of books. Thinking about readers in history raises the difficult problem of how one determines literacy rates in cultures and times remote from our own: what proportion of the population could read or (a very different question) write? Still more challenging is the recovery of the actual experience of past readers: how did they interpret and respond to
The Waste Land,
dime novels,
The Social Contract,
the Qur’an? In what sources can we find evidence of something so internal and non-material as reading? This may be one of the most intriguing questions that book historians confront, and this
Companion
reports some fascinating answers.

Yet reading is only one of many ways of accessing a text. We should not underestimate oral and aural traditions, which did not cease when writing was invented. Right up to the present day, many people have had their first and sometimes only experience of a text by hearing it. The oral delivery of text has a lively history even in the most literate of societies: monks of the Benedictine order listening to readings as they worked, a newspaper being read out in a pub by the most literate member of a group of working men, the enormous success in the past few decades of audio books on cassettes and CDs. Just as writing complemented rather than replaced orality, so too manuscript culture did not vanish when printing arrived. Many collections of high-status verse were circulated in Italy in the sixteenth century and in England in the seventeenth century in manuscript rather than be subject to the vulgar and commercial process of printing. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers often compiled handwritten commonplace books in which favorite verse and prose would be laboriously copied out to create an individualized anthology of texts. Writing is vital in that frequent dialogue between a published author and a reader (sometimes an exasperated one) which often takes the form of handwritten notes or marks in the margin of a printed text. In addition, such dialogues often provide an invaluable form of evidence for reading experience in the past. This
Companion
recognizes that book history involves a continuous interplay of orality, writing, and print.